Fingerless Gloves (10 page)

As I approached the car, I couldn’t tell what Street was doing. I opened the door and looked at him. He was holding a pack of gum, one of those packs that had a lift top to be opened horizontally. It looked like it had been mauled. The entire top flap was ripped off, exposing the neat rows of gum nestled against foil. I sat down in the driver’s seat as Streets looked at me and said,

“Wintergreen melts in your pocket after awhile. You ever chew gum when you’re stoned? You can’t even taste it. It just tastes like cold. If I could only get a piece unstuck from this piece of shit pack, I’d give you one…”

He continued struggling with the gum as I swung the car out of the parking spot. Out in front of the apartment building, it was horror-movie quiet - the kind of quiet that leads to the first-person sequence of the killer approaching an unsuspecting house. You see everything through the eyeholes of a mask as the soon-to-be victim whistles and prepares dinner. The LCD in the car read 1:55am. The little colon in between the numbers kept blinking on and off and it reminded me that I was, in fact, still mildly under the influence of drugs. My eyes were most likely glassy and cracking…craving Visene. As Streets started meticulously removing the thin paper wrapper from around the piece of gum he’d removed, I looked up at the apartment building. The lights were still on in, give or take, 4% of the windows. I imagined how Alfred Hitchcock told James Stewart to feel while looking into all those windows, imaging all the possibilities of what could be behind glass and closed blinds. This romantic moment was interrupted by my passenger: “Finally, I got two out. Take one of these and just chew it. I’m telling you…it’s Wintergreen and it’s the coldest of the cold.”

Sure enough, the minty chewing gum proved to be a radical experience. For all those out there experimenting with certain substances, I recommend a very strong gum. It’s like alleviating your fear of swallowing mouthwash. As the chewing slowly became a reflex, I fished around in my pocket for the bag of weed Tim had given me. I held it out to Streets, who promptly turned on the interior light to inspect it.

Streets, with a satisfied look on his face, said “Thanks Anton. Much appreciated my friend. Now I’ll have something to do tomorrow night.” With that, he took the small, sealed blue baggie from between my fingers and, shifting down in his seat, put it in the front pocket of his terrible shirt.

Streets said, “It’s 2am, I should probably go by the arcade to meet this girl I’ve been talking to. She hangs out front…you’ve probably seen her out there: red hair, big sweaters, no shoes… anyway, if you could just drop me off in the parking lot…that’d be sweet.”

I was certain I had no idea who he was talking about. I didn’t ask what kind of girl hangs out in front of an arcade that’s already been closed for three hours. I didn’t even want to know the girl’s name. With my brain still foggy, and the gum in my mouth proving to be just the right amount of stimuli, I wouldn’t have remembered the details had he told me. There would have been head nodding, maybe some “hmms” and a few “okays”, but that’s it. I started thinking that, after I dropped Streets off at the arcade, I should probably just go home…back to my one bedroom. I wanted to be functional the next day in order to visit James at his house after they let him out of the hospital. I remember thinking, “Has it really been that long since I’ve been up this late?”

We pulled in the arcade parking lot and, surprisingly, there were still a good number of teenagers navigating the empty curbs and standing in front of the dirty windows. The only thing still open was the 24-hour pancake house, which was bound to be full of characters eating for some other reason than pangs of hunger. The big, borderline-gaudy sign still lit up most of the parking lot, even more than normal since the other signs had been turned off. Streets gestured towards a group of usuals leaning against the dark window of the hardware store next to the pancake house.

“Anton, my man, you can drop me off right here. I’ll just walk up…you know, they’ll think I’ve been on foot all night…hopefully they’ll give me that good spot, right in the groove next to the door.”

With that, I stopped the car and said, “Streets, go forth now…with your pot. Go to that girl and win her over with drugs and meaningful conversation.”

He looked at me confused, before getting out of the car. He gave me a thumbs-up and shut the door behind him. I stopped the Escape in a far off parking row and watched him walk up to the hardware store. I remember being younger, buying a laser pointer at that hardware store. We’d shine the beams into each other’s eyes to see how long we could handle it without blinking. The clerks there used to hate us, as we were obviously nothing close to serious hardware customers. We bought spray paint to blow up in the woods. We bought pocketknives just to feel dangerous and important and threatening.

With the car off, I watched as Streets approached the group of kids standing against the hardware store wall. He walked up and slapped a few hands, but he leaned in and said something to this girl that set her laughing. She looked younger, with red hair cut into a bob. She had on a ripped leather jacket over a big sweater, red lipstick, and skinny jeans stretching over substantial thighs. When she smiled, the angle her head was tilted and the glow from the pancake house sign made her skin look extra white. Streets had his hands in his pockets as he held court, in front of a hardware store, just after 2am on a Saturday morning. I remembered nights at the pancake house and wondered what some of those girls we used to hang out with were doing. When I was a much younger man, when I was convinced that the only way to make something of myself was to leave my town, I used to imagine this entire place…the streets and the houses and the arcade, pancake house, and the mall, covered in thick sap, holding everything in place. Things would be exactly as they were, but you could only admire it from afar, never actually getting to touch the things held inside. Everything would shrink down to a cute, affectionate, snow globe version of my youth. I breathed out a heavy sigh as I honestly had every intention of ending my evening…then my cell phone rang. The caller-ID told me it was my little cousin, Nichole.

Nichole was originally Nicole. She was 19 years old and taking on-again, off-again classes at the county community college. At 18, Nicole added the “H” …legally and properly, filling out all the necessary paperwork herself. She insisted it was because she was tired of feeling unoriginal. She had no boyfriend that I knew about. She had about 25 “close friends” but no best friend. Her parents, my Aunt Ruth and uncle Sean, did not have fantastic names…they were normal and married and functioning. In fact, speaking of unoriginal, Aunt Ruth was a secretary at an insurance company’s office a few towns away. Uncle Sean was a 4th grade teacher at grammar school one town over. Nicole was an only child, as evident by the slew of pictures I had to look at during every holiday spent at her family’s modest home. She was plastered all over the refrigerator - these relic-type photos of little Nicole (before the “h”) in front of various school picture template backgrounds, including starburst and autumn leaves. There was Nicole again, in the corner of the fridge, in her elementary school’s soccer uniform, superimposed on a fake Wheaties box, sitting with her elbow resting on some wooden façade. She was in her prom dress on the mantle and in various Halloween costumes (the cute ones that come directly before the sexed-up ones) on the living room table. In her house, little Nicole’s face was like wallpaper. Images of Nichole with an “H” were not, however, prominent. In fact, there were no pictures of a teenage or adult Nichole on display in her parent’s home at all.

With Nichole’s image overhaul came the incessant partying. She got herself a new identity on a poorly laminated piece of plastic. To bouncers and doormen, she was some girl from Idaho or Indiana. She began going out on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. She rarely missed a day. Friday and Saturday nights were for the clubs, where she’d wear tight, barely-able-to-be-called skirts, even in winter. She’d then hike them up to dance with any one of a large number of suitors. Tuesday and Thursday nights were for the bars, where, dressed more modestly, she’d take ownership the jukebox, usually without much resistance. By the end of the night, she’d also end up owning the attention spans of every man in the room. I should know this because I went out with her exactly twice: once on a Tuesday and once on a Saturday. On both nights, for as drunk as I was, watching her work her magic, on the dance floor or posted against the bar, was all I needed to see to know that the “h” had made all the difference.

Regular partying had cost her various things: good grades, any semblance of what could be considered a serious boyfriend, her car (taken away after numerous speeding tickets), four cell phones, and two digital cameras. Her ID, coupled with her looks, worked like a charm no matter if it was a fancy city nightclub or our town’s lone liquor store. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sean didn’t understand why their daughter disappeared, four nights a week at least, until 4 or 5am. They went to confession at the local parish, no doubt trying to wipe some imaginary slate clean and save face in the eyes of Jesus in order to have a chance at an intervention with their daughter. Nichole, in the mean time, was taking her show to other towns and other cities. She was a far cry from local. In every zip code, I imagined someone knew who she was. Her network of friends and acquaintances constantly provided her with weeknight and weekend plans. This is why, of all the people who could be calling me, I couldn’t understand why her name was showing up on my caller ID in the middle of the night.

When I flipped opened my phone, before I could even put it up to my ear, I heard her voice, cigarette-raspy and frantic. “Anton, you need to come get me right now.”

I wondered, immediately, if I would have time to smoke some more pot or if this was a real emergency. My struggle had always been mixing up the importance of things. Judging by the tone of her voice, getting high again would have to wait. Back into the receiver, I asked, “Where are you and what’s going on?”

I could hear things happening in the background of our phone call. I heard people yelling and cars peeling out, tires on asphalt. There was some music on, something heavy on the bass. Male voices spoke muffled, creating the background air of panic. I could hear Nichole breathing heavily into the phone, as if she was power walking or running with great effort. In between breaths she spoke, “I’m in town…at Rachel Rannie’s house…over on Crescent and Ozone…cul-de-sac…she was having this banger and…things turned ugly…cocaine…all happening down the street.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. Rachel Rannie lived in probably one of the top-five nicest houses in our town. She was notable for her advanced drug habits, mainly coke, but rumors swirled of even harder contraband. Rachel was no longer known for her house parties because, back in 10th grade, she had tried to throw the most epic rager in town history. One weekend, when her parents went to their lake house, she put out an open invitation at the high school. As the party spilled out onto her front porch, driveway, and into the quiet, dead-end street she lived on, some neighbor decided that enough was enough. Over 75 kids ended up detained by police. Her older brother and three of his co-workers ended up getting arrested and charged for providing five kegs for just about every minor in our town to drink from. Since then, despite the fact that her parents had actually managed to forget about the incident enough that they allowed her out of the house, she had not even attempted to throw another party. That is, until now.

I sputtered into the phone, “Nichole, are you there? I’ve spent my entire night not quite stoned…well, bordering on kind of stoned. At certain points, I was stoned. I’m on my way.”

I started to get chills…a tingle in my scrotum, like when you’re called on to do something important. Nichole, since she’d turned 18, had spoken to me maybe five times. Of those five times, four of them were her asking if I could get her drugs. The fifth was at her birthday last year, when she asked me how I was doing. I started to answer just as she walked away, her attention grabbed by someone or something else. I snapped the phone shut and began discreetly trying to roll out of arcade parking lot. I didn’t want the leftover kids, including Streets, to know I’d been lurking like a killer for just over 15 minutes. I put the heat on and rolled the windows up. In retrospect, the proverbial chills had turned into actual chills…I was freezing. As I tested the Escape’s shocks by dropping off the corner of the curb on my way out of the parking lot, I realized that my cover had been blown. In the sideview mirror, before I made the right out of the parking lot, for a split second I caught a couple of the wall hangers pick up their heads and slowly turn in my direction.

It was 2:12am; and we were now well into the next day. I was the only car on the road and I could hear my own tires rolling over the asphalt. Rachel lived on the north end of town, in the section that people called Lifted Loft. No one ever questioned why this part of town was given such a terrible nickname. People tried to jazz it up by calling it “Double L”, “The Double”, or just “L”. All sounded equally stupid and poorly thought out. As I drove into the night, dreading the arrival at my destination, I realized just how killed my earlier high had become. There was no question that I could function properly as I was no longer quite under the influence of drugs.

The ability to multitask had always been one of my strongest points. While paying attention to the road, I began to think of soft pretzel bites at the movie theater. The theater employees must have gotten extraordinarily annoyed when I wiped the salt off the pretzels and onto the floor. I also had a habit of sneaking in my own gourmet mustard, usually inconspicuously stuffed under my shirt. I moved on to pondering just what went into making Sesame Chicken and fried rice. Do the restaurants buy the chicken that size, or do they cut each piece? What’s the ratio of scallions to pork in the rice? I thought about, as a kid, how my parents used to take me to the hibachi restaurants to watch the chefs make corny jokes and flip shrimp into patron’s pockets. It wasn’t until I was older than I realized the jokes and ambiance at those places is artificial. One time, I spoke to one of the chefs, who was not Asian at all. He told me that he got into hibachi preparation when his construction business went under. As my mind wandered on, back to summer vacations, Memorial Day Weekends, and that one Thanksgiving where we only had six people for dinner at our house, the night seemed to melt like mints left in a glove box.